On 03 Jul 2014, at 01:09, David Nyman wrote:
On 2 July 2014 22:04, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote:
Since the primary truth of what I
see is simply what I see (i.e. it is incorrigible) it can't be
subject
to Gettier's paradox. I can't be right about what I see for the
wrong
reasons because what I see is constitutively true.
But is it incorrigble? An optical illusion can cause you to see "A
is
bigger than B" even though A is smaller than B. Of course you can
say,
"Well, it's still incorrigbly true that A *appeared* bigger than
B." but
that's different.
Well, it isn't different to my point, which is precisely that what I
see (i.e. the 1p part) corresponds in the first instance to the truth
content of my visual belief system (i.e. the 3p part). Note that
"there is nothing I can do about it". Hence in this case belief and
truth are necessarily, constitutively, or analytically, equivalent.
Yes, even when the content is wrong. I think this might be the case when
1) []p & ~p
yet:
2) []([]p) & []p. You know "[]p". Without knowing if "[]" is correct
or not.
Only in the second instance are they vulnerable to correction.
OK. Which correspond to the "1)" above.
One
might say that belief and truth in this first sense are incorrigibly
bound together in a common vulnerability to secondary, or empirical,
error.
Or error in the wiring of "[]", which we can't know either. That's the
possibility/consistency of self-inconsistency, especially when adding
new axioms.
What you literally *saw* was that A was bigger than B,
i.e. that is the immediate perception
and it only later that you are
persuaded that it was "mere" appearance.
So the perception that your brain
forms is really creating a model based on sensory input
Yes, that's the "first instance" to which I refer above..
and it can be wrong
Yes, primary belief, though necessarily incorrigible in the first
instance, is nonetheless vulnerable in the second instance to
correction or reinterpretation. Just as well, really.
In other words
there is no "seeing at all without interpretation"; There is no
"simply what
I see".
I think you have been conflating two different senses of
"interpretation" that I specifically intended to distinguish. The
first corresponds to the immediate perception associated with the
visual belief system and the second with subsequent correction or
reinterpretation. Only the first sense is incorrigible.
And non definable, except in some non constructive manner, by us,
looking from outside, and limiting our interview of machine saying
"[]p" to the one living in realities where the p are satisfied. The
set of such realities is highly non computable, which is the kind of
set expected for theology.
But that's not the point of Gettier's paradox. Gettier's paradox
is that
you may believe something that is true by accident, e.g. with no
causal
connection to the facts that make it true. Under Theaetetus's
definition
this counts as knowledge, but not under a common sense understanding.
I think you may now see that this doesn't contradict my point. If the
visual belief system and its associated truth content are
constitutively equivalent, there is no question of "truth by accident"
in the first instance. Of course any second-order reinterpretation of
such first-order beliefs may be empirically "true" by accident, or
wholly untrue for that matter, but that is a different question.
Right, I think. Gettier's paradox does not apply, or apply only on
inconsistent machine which believes that when they believes something
it has to be true.
Machine are almost bound up to do that confusion. We can understand
the difference between belief and knowledge only by being wrong,
acknowledge it and remembering it. A priori "believing" is
"knowledge". To take distance is the result of a learning process,
although the ideally correct machine can get it by pure introspection
(like when PA proves its own second incompleteness theorem, or Löb's
theorem).
Specifically, if a theory lacks an
explicit epistemological strategy then, in despite of any success in
elucidating the structure of appearance, it may in the end tend to
obfuscate, rather than illuminate, fundamental questions
pertaining to
the knowledge of such appearances.
"May tend" is fairly weak criticism in face to enormous success.
The success
is because science "closes the loop" by testing its theories. The
"epistemological strategy" is to pass those tests.
But "science" and comp are not in opposition. To the contrary, if comp
as an explanatory strategy is to have any hope of being successful it
must *become* "science" and hence pass all empirical tests that are
thrown at it.
OK.
And in any case I'm not criticising the success of the
current paradigm, I'm merely speculating, on grounds that I've argued,
as to whether that same success can ultimately extend to questions
which were, in a certain sense, deliberately sidelined at the start.
But such apparently "subsidiary" questions may ultimately expose an
explanatory Achilles' heel. Time will tell, I guess.
Hopefully. If the materialists eliminate the person, time might not
tell, I'm afraid.
Is that true? In what way do the collapse hypothesis or Everett's
interpretation depend on how human beings work in detail?
They depend on human thought being quasi-classical, even though
humans
are (presumably) made of quantum systems. This is just part of the
bigger
question of how does the appearance of the classical world arise
from a
quantum substrate.
OK, thanks, I see what you mean. But I suppose you didn't mean to say
that this implies a dependency on any theory of knowledge in
particular, other than it be capable of being represented
quasi-classically. Is that accurate?
Human bodies might be made of quantum systems. No machine souls is
*made of* anything. It is more a semantical fixed point conjuncted to
a representational fixed point. As you say, the correspondence is not
a coincidence, it is not accidental, despite its many interpretation
can be wrong, as they can be accidentally right.
Bruno
David
On 7/2/2014 8:51 AM, David Nyman wrote:
On 2 July 2014 01:24, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote:
Well, I was trying to be short, hence "to put it simply". Would
you
take issue with the preceding statement that "The point, again in
principle at least, is that nothing *above* the level of the basic
ontology need be taken into account in the evolution of states
defined
in terms of it."? And if so, what essential difference would your
specific disagreement make to the point in question?
I agree with that.
Good, that's the essential premise I've been reasoning from.
I'm saying that comp uses its basic ontological assumptions to
motivate an epistemology - i.e. a theory of knowledge and knowers.
Well, it assumes one; although I'm not sure how the ontology of
arithmetical
realism motivated it. It assumes that provable+true=known. I
don't
think
this is a good axiom in the sense of "obviously true". It's
subject to
Gettier's paradox.
I don't think this is the right way to think about it. Take, for
example, the truth of what I see (i.e. the truth-consequence of my
"visual belief system"). The truth of what I see is incorrigible and
quite distinct from any interpretations that may subsequently be
imposed on it (as we can intuit from demonstrations of how easily
our
visual belief system can be fooled). Since the primary truth of
what I
see is simply what I see (i.e. it is incorrigible) it can't be
subject
to Gettier's paradox. I can't be right about what I see for the
wrong
reasons because what I see is constitutively true.
But is it incorrigble? An optical illusion can cause you to see "A
is
bigger than B" even though A is smaller than B. Of course you can
say,
"Well, it's still incorrigbly true that A *appeared* bigger than
B." but
that's different. What you literally *saw* was that A was bigger
than B,
i.e. that is the immediate perception and it only later that you are
persuaded that it was "mere" appearance. So the perception that
your brain
forms is really creating a model based on sensory input and it can
be wrong
- which is why you're not usually aware of your blind spot. In
other words
there is no "seeing at all without interpretation"; There is no
"simply what
I see".
But that's not the point of Gettier's paradox. Gettier's paradox
is that
you may believe something that is true by accident, e.g. with no
causal
connection to the facts that make it true. Under Theaetetus's
definition
this counts as knowledge, but not under a common sense understanding.
To the contrary, the irreducible relation between truth and belief
in
this sense may point towards a resolution of a different and more
intractable paradox, the POPJ. I think the thrust of Bruno's
argument
is that the truth of what I see and the logic of my visual beliefs
(both of which, as manifested physically, I take to be represented
in
my neurology) converge on the same referents by means of distinct
epistemological logics. More crudely, they represent the same thing
under two different ways of knowing.
By contrast it is difficult to see how any theory relying on a
reductionist ontology without recourse to an explicit epistemology
can
avoid the POPJ. My judgements about what I see cannot be a
consequence
of what I see, since ex hypothesi both what I see and my judgements
about it are "really" my neurology (as in the case of "one part of
the
brain monitoring another"). At least, that's the conventional take
on
the paradox. More stringently, one might say that under reductionism
(as I think Stathis has, in effect, suggested) the POPJ is
eliminated
in the same move as the phenomena and the judgements. Whether this
outcome is an improvement is, I guess, a matter of taste.
But there's nothing wrong with assuming a model and
seeing where it leads.
My point exactly. And my argument, in general, has been that where a
model can lead may fundamentally be delimited by the explanatory
strategy adopted at the outset. Specifically, if a theory lacks an
explicit epistemological strategy then, in despite of any success in
elucidating the structure of appearance, it may in the end tend to
obfuscate, rather than illuminate, fundamental questions
pertaining to
the knowledge of such appearances.
"May tend" is fairly weak criticism in face to enormous success.
The success
is because science "closes the loop" by testing its theories. The
"epistemological strategy" is to pass those tests.
What is interesting, at the very
least, is that Bruno has presented some general grounds for hoping
that a suitably developed "general theory of epistemology" may be
capable of illuminating both.
Maybe. But Bruno also wants to reach empirical tests. Otherwise
it's
armchair philosophizing - as was so common and unproductive among the
scholastics.
I disagree. I'm using epistemological in the sense of what is
consequential on an explicit theory of knowledge and knowers.
AFAIK
physics deploys no such explicit theory and relies on no such
consequences; in fact it seeks to be independent of any particular
such theory, which is tacitly regarded as being irrelevant to
what is
to be explained. That is my criterion for distinguishing the two
types
of theory I had in mind.
OK. Although, physics does struggle with that it means to observe
something
because observation is never as a superposition. It is assumed
that we
need
to know about how humans work to answer this in detail.
Is that true? In what way do the collapse hypothesis or Everett's
interpretation depend on how human beings work in detail?
They depend on human thought being quasi-classical, even though
humans are
(presumably) made of quantum systems. This is just part of the
bigger
question of how does the appearance of the classical world arise
from a
quantum substrate.
Brent
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